Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  For some reason he knew he would never fathom, Nancy capitulated. She admitted to ‘putting pressure’ on Imogen and Sukie, presenting the police with a confused, and confusing, justification centred on the need for information, where she tried to explain the fear and threat arising from ignorance, concealment and uncertainty in a place such as the Hermitage. ‘You’ve got to know,’ she had told them. ‘If only some people know about something that’s so bloody important, you can’t be sure they’re not holding back something else that could affect you.’ Her sentiments were very similar to those Justine expressed to McKenna, but spoken from a totally self-centred perspective, the voice of a personality deformed and brutalised by the years of bullying Nancy herself had endured. She flatly and consistently denied any involvement in Sukie’s death, or indeed, any knowledge of it. Charlotte was dismissed as a possible candidate with a contemptuous comment. ‘She wouldn’t have the bottle,’ Nancy said. ‘And she can’t stand the sight of blood.’

  Jack went from the subjects, as he saw them, to the deposed monarch, but Freya Scott had already reorganised her defences. Far from expressing any contrition, she laid the blame ‘fairly and squarely’ at the feet of the police. ‘Your response to Sukie’s death was sluggish and shallow,’ she said. ‘Had Superintendent McKenna set his mind to the task in hand, instead of allowing himself to be — shall we say too easily, and most inappropriately, sidetracked? — Imogen would not have tried to kill herself, Daisy would not he dead, and I would not have been made the scapegoat.’

  ‘And how was Superintendent McKenna “sidetracked” ?’

  ‘That,’ she replied, with a dark hint, ‘is something you must ask him.’

  ‘On the contrary, Dr Scott, if you’re aware of police misconduct or negligence, you’re under an obligation to report it.’

  He left the ball in her court but sure she would somehow, sometime, hit back, he had reported the conversation to McKenna, and suggested they organise their own defence.

  ‘But first,’ he had said, ‘I need to know what she’s getting at.’

  McKenna, squirming with embarrassment, eventually told him. ‘When I was in the lift with her, going up to Imogen’s room after the incident with Nancy, she suddenly fell against me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She sort of collapsed. In despair, it seemed.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I put my hands on her shoulders.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Offering a stiff little shrug, McKenna said, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s implying a lot more.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she is.’

  ‘Well,’ Jack remarked, ‘if she does try to make capital out of it, you just say you reacted as any normal person would when somebody looks like they’re about to keel over.’

  ‘It’s as easy as that, is it?’

  ‘You hardly had time to get into her underwear,’ Jack had said trenchantly. ‘Even if you’d wanted to.’

  Dewi’s knees were aching. He had lost count of the times he had already knelt, stood, and knelt again, all to the subdued shuffle of hundreds of other feet and the rustle of as many garments.

  He thought it wrong for them to be there. However indirectly, they were to blame for Daisy’s death, for negligence, unwitting or not, always ended in disaster. Torrance was as good as dead, and that was their fault, too, because the truth about her had died with Daisy. Remembering the devastation Daisy’s story wreaked upon the Torrance he had first encountered on the ride through the woods gave him the same, sick wrench in the pit of his stomach that he experienced when he saw her thrown from Purdey’s back. McKenna had been utterly averse to questioning her about the allegations, but the fact that Alice had been party to them forced his hand, and although Alice doggedly maintained that Daisy had lied, Torrance was, as Martha had predicted, destroyed. As soon as she was allowed to leave the school, she had loaded Tonto and Purdey into a horsebox and driven away, all her vividness permanently tarnished by the dirt of uncertainty.

  At Sukie’s funeral, John Melville told Jack that she had paid them more for Purdey than the mare originally cost, and then, commenting on the sudden upturn in their monetary fortunes, said bitterly, ‘And much good it will bring.’

  Much good avarice brought anyone, Dewi reflected. The Olivers were facing several criminal charges, for despite the likely consequences for herself, Imogen had co-operated willingly in her parents’ downfall, and provided the police with a damning account of their conspiracy. That was perhaps the only certainty in this morass of ambiguity, for when Sukie’s clothes failed to yield up their secrets to the most intense scrutiny science could apply, the police lost their last opportunity to uncover the truth of her death.

  He was sitting closer to the aisle than the others and could see a procession beginning to form at the altar. When he glanced round, he saw the doors being opened in readiness and the light breaking through had a silvery edge, an uneasy glitter. A black-garbed figure standing in the shadow of a column caught his eye and for a moment, he thought it was Freya Scott.

  Every bone in Martha’s body ached. When the final prayers were done and the Reverend Blackwell signalled for the choir to move from their stalls, she hooked her fingers over the pew in front to pull herself upright. Little flurries of activity rippled through the nave like a soft wind as the congregation readied itself.

  Daisy’s mother felt as if someone had torn open her chest, closed their fingers around her heart and were pulling it shred by bloody shred from its moorings. She had never imagined such a sensation possible, but she had never imagined her child’s death. All the love she had never shown Daisy, all the emotion she never suspected might exist, had come out of hiding to destroy her, and inside the coffin from which she could not take her eyes was what remained of a whole human being she had simply never known. When she unpacked Daisy’s baggage, she found the diary in the backpack, but read no further than the first few entries before grief threatened to annihilate her. Her husband said the diary, the clothes, the toys, the books — every relic of Daisy’s existence — should be burned. She said she would kill him if he laid a finger on one single thing, then locked Daisy’s room, hid the key, and squirreled away the diary for a time when she might have the strength to read on.

  Grace, her godchild, was looking at her, yet again; doe-eyed, sorrowful, cloyingly sympathetic. Daisy’s mother wanted to kill her, too, just for being alive.

  Shielding her candle from the draught, waiting patiently for the rest of the choir to line up behind her, Grace swivelled her gaze from her godmother to peek past her father’s skirts to the coffin, where her secret was totally safe, screwed down tight with Daisy and destined for the incinerator.

  She could still barely believe how miraculously chance had played into her hands. Matron’s dismissal was especially fortuitous, because in her absence, it fell to one of the assistant matrons to watch over the girls in the infirmary. The assistant, who worked nights as an office cleaner to augment her lousy wages, was, as always, tired: too tired to argue with Grace when she said she did not feel well enough to go to chapel on that fateful Sunday morning. She took the other girls and left Grace alone and unsupervised.

  Grace had slipped out of school through the French doors in the visitors’ room, crept along the front of the building and into the woods. Learning from the near fiasco that Torrance’s hurriedly improvised accident turned out to be, she had made extensive contingency plans for Daisy, but none of them was necessary. Within minutes, she had seen Daisy and the policewoman meandering through the grounds.

  As the pall bearers began to lift the coffin, Grace nodded gravely in response to her father’s brief, proud smile, thinking yet again how Daisy had all but co-operated in her own death. She must have known why she had to die, Grace decided, for when she took flight off the pavilion steps, her face was a picture.

  In most respects Daisy and Sukie could no
t have been more different, but they shared the fatal flaw of not knowing when to keep quiet. Despite Daisy’s own multitudinous imperfections, she had been very quick to insist that Grace owned up to being out of the dorm on Tuesday night — ‘you could’ve theen thomething the polithe’ll want to know,’ she had said, in that excruciating voice. Her snide remarks about Grace’s ‘prethiouth jewelth’, made in front of the policewoman, put Grace through sheer hell. Sukie had done nothing more than urge her to confess, but on pain of exposure, and to return what she had stolen from Imogen. Under the surplice, against her flesh, Grace could feel the cold weight of the beautiful diamond pendant that soon, she would be free to flaunt to her heart’s content.

  The congregation rose as one when the Reverend Blackwell started down the altar steps. Alice saw the people in front swivel round to watch the coffin pass, and steeled herself for her turn, conscious that this was the beginning of another ending.

  She recognised that her time at the Hermitage was done when Martha drove her down the crazy drive and out of the gates at the end of term. Those last few weeks had been terrible. There was no Open Day, no Sports Day, nothing but the school’s lifeblood leaking away. She thought Vivienne Wade had somehow made the first, fatal cut when she played her ‘get out of gaol’ card the day after Daisy died. Other girls followed her, in dribs and drabs and then in a flood. When the police caravan disappeared, the horrible but so believable rumours about Daisy began, plunging Alice into a new despair. The night Sukie died, she had fallen asleep as soon as Torrance switched off the lights and would go to her grave wondering if it were true that Daisy left the dorm to murder Sukie.

  When the coffin glided past, she shivered, but could still not imagine Daisy inside. Her abiding memories were of Daisy alive, yet the lisping voice and dark presence already haunted her dreams. One day, perhaps, she would be able to mourn, for all that was lost and all that must remain unknown.

  Janet hoped fervently that once Daisy’s funeral was over, she might start learning to live with her guilt, for it would certainly never leave her. Even more passionately, she hoped that Freya Scott was equally burdened. It was rumoured the woman had already wormed her way back into the army, and God help them, Janet thought, if she served the fighting forces as well as she had the school. When the tall iron gates closed on the last pupil, everyone knew they would never open again. Except for Matron, who was left to her own grim fate, the Hermitage was abandoned, but not because the reality of Freya Scott’s little empire had been exposed. Once she had gone, the school lost all its lustre for the many parents who unswervingly believed in her and the dreams she purveyed. She had, many said, been ruined by the wayward girls she tried to guide through the stormy waters of adolescence. Sukie was already being touted as the architect of both her own and of Freya Scott’s destruction; before long, Janet thought, she would also be blamed for Daisy’s death.

  Music soared heavenwards from the organ as the procession advanced. With the rustle of robes and the whisper of feet on stone, the Reverend Blackwell halted briefly before turning for the door. For a moment, Grace was in full view. Her chorister’s garb lent charm, and with candlelight mellow on her face, she resembled a story-book child, dressed in a nightgown and bearing a candle to light the way to bed. As the procession moved off once more, she offered Janet a brief, knowing smile.

  Past and present collided. With brutal clarity, Janet recalled those first few hours at the school, and retrieved the memory that had wilfully eluded her since the evening she collected Imogen’s new stick and crutches from the hospital. She had been in the refectory, reviewing her notes before talking to the next batch of girls, when she chanced upon a snatch of conversation.

  ‘You mutht have theen thomething on Tuethday night,’ Daisy had lisped.

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Bollockth!’ Daisy snapped, glaring at the girl Janet would come to know as Grace Blackwell. ‘I timed you,’ she added. ‘You were out of the dorm for more than an hour.’

  ‘I’ve told you!’ Grace insisted. ‘I was waiting for Matron outside her office.’ Face puckering, she had begun to snivel. ‘I wanted something for my headache. So, there!’

  If you enjoyed reading Child’s Play you might be interested in Unsafe Convictions by Alison Taylor, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Unsafe Convictions by Alison Taylor

  Chapter One

  ASPECTS OF GUILT

  Two years after Piers Stanton Smith received a life sentence for murdering his ex-wife, the Court of Appeal judged his conviction ‘unsafe’. Accused of corruption, the police officers who sent him to prison are now themselves under investigation. In the first of three major articles, our chief reporter Gaynor Holbrook looks into the tragic background of this miscarriage of justice.

  On a chilly April after-noon, someone in Haughton battered thirty-six-year-old Trisha Stanton Smith into oblivion, drenched her home in petrol, and dropped a match. The autopsy on her charred remains proved that the cause of death was smoke inhalation. Ten days later, her thirty-one-year-old ex-husband was arrested for murder.

  Haughton, where Trisha spent all her life, is a bleak, wind-swept town in the Pennine hills. Manchester and Sheffield are twenty-odd miles away, over snaking moorland roads that are often blocked by winter blizzards. At one time, the town’s monumental mills reverberated to the thump and roar of King Cotton’s massive machinery. Now, the vast empty walls echo to the drip of water through ruined roofs, the whine of bitter winds off the moors, and the scuttle of vermin.

  Shortly before she died, Trisha lodged an alimony claim against Smith. By then, he was married to Beryl Kay. She inherited one fortune from her grandfather, the owner of the town’s largest clothes shop. She later made another one by selling the shop site to a supermarket chain.

  Smith’s trial began at Manchester Crown Court on a raw November day, and the public gallery was packed. Trisha’s widowed father, Fred Jarvis, never saw his former son-in-law in the dock — he was still too distraught over the murder. But her sister, Linda Newton, was a key prosecution witness. Oddly, Beryl was never called, but she sat through every harrowing second of testimony.

  The prosecution argued that Trisha had to die to stop the squalid secrets of her marriage reaching Beryl’s ears. In her divorce petition, Trisha described eight years of terror as Smith’s wife. She was beaten, humiliated, sexually debased, and dragged into debt. Ravaged by stress, she became too ill to work. As their income went from bad to worse, so did Smith’s behaviour. Then, she had to go into hospital for a gynaecological operation.

  ‘I was still in dreadful pain when they sent me home,’ she had written. ‘I was crawling on the floor I hurt so much. He screamed at me to get up, but I couldn’t, so he kicked me between my legs as hard as he could.’

  One by one, the prosecution witnesses slashed Smith’s reputation to shreds. He was not ‘Piers Stanton Smith’ from a small village in South Yorkshire, but plain Peter Smith from a corporation housing block in Sheffield. Then frail, elderly Henry Colclough spoke of the ‘wickedly cruel’ death his wife Joyce suffered in her blazing car, while ten-year-old Smith calmly watched.

  ‘Joyce was his teacher. She was giving him a lift home from school, but something happened. She drove straight into a tree, and her legs were trapped under the dashboard. He got out, but when he saw the flames licking around the car, he stood and watched instead of running for help. He kept on watching, until she was dead.’ Looking steadily at the blue-eyed man in the dock, Colclough added: ‘I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. Never! And it’s still there. It makes my blood run cold.’

  Linda Newton claimed her former brother-in-law was a closet homosexual as well as a violent monster. Relentlessly cross-examined by Smith’s barrister, she had to admit that Trisha had her own flaws. But she was outraged by the suggestion that Trisha connived masochistically in her own pain. When it came to the advertisements Trisha placed in several lonely hearts columns while she was still m
arried, Linda hung her head and refused to reply.

  ‘According to your testimony, Mrs Newton,’ the barrister said, ‘your sister was completely demoralised by the violence and sexual humiliation she allegedly suffered at my client’s hands. That picture of her sits very uneasily with that of a woman confident enough to solicit approaches from total strangers, and a woman who, for all we know, engaged sexually with one or more of them.’ He then denounced the police investigation for not finding these men. ‘Not one iota of forensic evidence links my client to the murder, whereas any one of these mystery lovers could have killed Trisha Stanton Smith.’

  The climax of the trial was Smith’s testimony on his own behalf. He talked about his deprived childhood, and his mother, who died many years ago. Then he described life with the unstable, neurotic Trisha, who devised her own ways of violence. He was asked why he did not defend her divorce petition. ‘I had to get free of her. She was destroying my personality, like water dripping on stone. She often threatened to ruin me, and now she is doing, even from beyond the grave. How can I defend myself against that?’

  Of course, he could not. Despite his lawyers’ best efforts and even the claim of an alibi for the murder, the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty. As he was led down to begin a life sentence, Beryl collapsed. Linda, gloatingly, hissed: ‘Rot in hell, you bastard!’

  Smith’s appeal was refused. He was forgotten by everyone except Beryl and Trisha’s family. Then a young Roman Catholic priest called Father John Barclay returned to England.